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'Free Bradley Manning':
A group of 40 campaigners gathered outside the American embassy in London on Saturday to protest against the incarceration of a US Army private accused of leaking information to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
Bradley Manning, 24, is charged with passing classified data and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source.
Protesters gathered outside Grosvenor Square, London
It is claimed he sent hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and war logs to Julian Assange's Wikileaks website while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
Manning could be sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted of the most serious offence, aiding the enemy.
On Saturday, protesters gathered in front of the heavily guarded Grosvenor Square building for more than an hour bearing Free Bradley Manning placards.
Ben Griffin, 34, a former SAS soldier and founding member of Veterans For Peace UK, addressed the crowd after observing a 30-minute silent vigil.
He said: "The most significant piece of resistance to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came when a young soldier released information that the US and UK governments would rather we did not know about.
"Among the files released through Wikileaks were the Afghan War Diaries which showed the day-to-day ritual killing and torture that has been going on in Afghanistan for years.
"Then the Iraq War Logs were released. As a result of those logs we found out about thousands of people killed in Iraq by US and UK troops that we did not know about.
"Through the diplomatic cable release we now know about the sneaky little deals with other governments so we do not know the reality of the wars.
Bradley Manning was incarcerated charged with passing classified data to WikiLeaks
"As a result of these leaks a young soldier has spent years in prison and still has not come to trial.
"As a result of action around the world the US military was forced to move him from Quantico (Virginia), to Fort Leavenworth (Kansas).
"That guy is still being held and for the last six months we've been coming here when Bradley Manning has been taken to a pre-trial hearing, when the military decide what is going to be allowed to come out in his case and what is not, and standing in solidarity."
Among the dozens of protesters were several wearing the V For Vendetta mask that has become associated with the hacking group Anonymous.
Others carried banners saying "Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime" and "Free Assange, Free Manning, End the war".
One demonstrator who gave her name only as Val, from Bedford, said: "Bradley Manning, I think, is a hero.
"If anybody should have got the Nobel Peace Prize it is him."
Fellow campaigner 38-year-old Glyn Jukes, from Wales, said: "He stands for truth and justice at a time when very few others are."
A demonstrator talks to police outside the Embassy on Saturday morning
Another protester, who asked to remain anonymous, said: "I think Bradley Manning should be released.
"I do not think he has morally broken any laws and what he has done will only help society."
After more than an hour outside the US Embassy the group moved to Ecuador's London embassy where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up for more than two months.
On Sunday August 20 when Assange appeared on the balcony of the embassy, he called on the US to end its "war on whistleblowers" and demanded the release of Bradley Manning.
Assange described him as a hero and "an example to all of us".
Missouri GOP senatorial candidate Todd Akin's absurd comment that women's bodies can prevent pregnancies in cases of "legitimate rape" is disgusting. It also points to a deeper problem within the GOP.
Plainly, this is a party that hates women. And given the huge gender gap opening up in favor of President Obama over the presumptive GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, this has important implications for economic and social policy going forward. Because if they win, the Democrats are less likely to embrace the draconian fiscal austerity proposals now advocated by Romney’s advisors, along with the party’s regressive social agenda.
The current Republican Party is a perverse coalition of the top 1 percent and the socially conservative right. The latter are not well off for the most part. The Koch brothers (and others of that ilk) have managed to convince the have-not religious fundamentalists to vote against their own economic interests and support their internal colonialism through economically regressive policies which are exacerbating the country’s mounting economic inequality.
This is untenable over the long run. Skewing income distributions by shoveling money to the top always ends in a big political upheaval. The social conservatives are older and aging and becoming less of the total electorate. Someday the GOP’s infernal combination will blow apart because the top 1 percent will be rejected by the masses and the numbers of the social conservatives will dwindle too much.
Why? Largely because of today’s new generation of women. Although they represent varying degrees of economic progressivism to conservatism, this generation is largely rejecting the social conservatism of the Creationists and hardcore fundamentalists on the right. President Obama continues to outpoll Mitt Romney by substantial margins among women voters. I would guess that this will more than offset the appeal Romney holds among angry white males, increasingly alienated by a country that is becoming less white, more socially diverse, a veritable rainbow coalition of different ethnicities rather than a Caucasian-dominated nation. An older generation of women who saw no other way than to be dependent and kept and sexually repressed is dying out.
This will change the economic landscape. Why? Well, take a look at the latest bit of "economic wisdom" from the Romney campaign (I owe this observation to economist Bill Mitchell), which has just put out an economic paper, The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs, written by Stanford’s John B Taylor, Harvard’s Greg Mankiew, Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, and Kevin Hassett from the American Enterprise Institute. These men make the following claims: America took a wrong turn in economic policy in the past three years. The United States underperformed the historical norm shown in the administration’s own forecasts, and its policies are to blame …These short-term stimulus packages were ineffective, leaving the nation with higher debt, which acts as a drag on long-term growth because households and businesses understand that the administration must raise taxes significantly to pay off that debt.
Romney’s economic team also claims that “uncertainty over policy” (i.e. the large deficits and the private fear of large tax hikes) is preventing a sound recovery in private spending. This has been a common theme among the conservatives since the governments decided to deploy fiscal stimulus.
True, President Obama also retains an unhealthy obsession with "long-term fiscal sustainability" and "entitlement reform" (i.e. shredding the social safety net). But for the most part, he has avoided the worst of the excesses of the fiscal austerity fanatics in Europe and those of the Tea Party in the U.S. As a consequence, the U.S. economy has continued to grow. True, it is below trend, but it is still growing and generating some jobs, in marked contrast to what is occurring on the other side of the pond.
Mainstream economic theory claims that that private spending is weak because we are scared of the future tax implications of the rising budget deficits. But the overwhelming evidence shows that if you own a business, you’re not going to invest while consumption is weak. And households will not spend because people are scared of becoming unemployed and are trying to reduce their bloated debt levels. Above all else, businesses need sales to encourage them to hire workers. A restaurant doesn't lay anyone off when it's full of paying customers, no matter how much the owner might hate the government, the paper work, and the health regulations; A department store doesn't lay off workers when it's full of paying customers; and an engineering firm doesn't lay anyone off when it has a backlog of orders.
And guess what? Women are not only more than half of the electorate, but they are a huge part of the overall aggregate demand for goods and services. Under the Republican agenda, women could well revert to a kind of economic serfdom, whose labor expended can be considered surplus to that required to maintain the survival of the man and his family.
In fact, if Romney's plan were to be introduced now or, worse yet, the automatic budget sequestration cuts proposed in the Budget Control Act from last fall were actually implemented, (which mandates across-the-board cuts to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years), then we'd likely experience a double-dip recession in the U.S. next year. Support for this view has been expressed by no less than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which argued in a report the other day, that the U.S. economy would slide into recession in fiscal 2013 if Congress fails to act to maintain current tax rates and avert deep cuts to federal spending.
Austerity advocates like Romney and Ryan are obsessed with putting the squeeze on public spending, especially broad social welfare and education. Their plans mean that workers get trapped in a low-skill, low-pay circle of disadvantage. The increasingly casualized labor market is reinforcing that pathology, particularly for women.
As strange as it sounds, the worst of these effects may well be thankfully nullified by the GOP's ongoing war on women voters -- the probable difference-makers in the upcoming election. Nat Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog is the ultimate wonk pollster, and the best guestimates now are that President Obama today is only ahead by around 3 to 4 percent. I think it is a little more. I think Obama will do better as Romney’s tax issues bring more revelations and the GOP war on women becomes center stage. Given the desultory state of the economy today, if the president wins by anywhere near the same margin as in 2008, the handwriting will truly be on the wall for the party of social conservatives, angry older white men and the 1 percenters themselves.
The changes that are occurring in the overall population as the next generation -- particularly women -- takes over will be death to the past Republican coalition. The GOP will eventually realize that its anti-choice stance and all that goes with it is a huge problem. The party will find that its viscerally anti-feminist rhetoric and policies will be even more of a killer in the future. And a byproduct of that will be that the corporate predators who comprise so much of the top 1 percenters will also realize that they can no longer govern with the support of social conservatives who vote against their own interests.
I think this election will make everyone realize that the future of the U.S. has already begun.
The following is an excerpt from Dennis Marker's new book 15 Steps to Corporate Feudalism, published this year. In the text below, Marker shares one of the steps he sees as central to the destruction of the middle class since Ronald Reagan took over.
Your goal for this step is to figure out how to teach the middle class to hate their own government using a strategy that takes into consideration the political climate of the United States of thirty years ago.
Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.
Obviously a government does not have to be on the side of its people, as can be seen by the existence of countless dictatorships and oligarchies throughout the world. Even the corporatocracy that currently exists in the United States falls far short of being on the side of its middle class. But US history shows that a government committed to serving its citizens can, in fact, help create and maintain a healthy middle class even in the face of powerful corporations whose only interest is maximizing their own power and profits.
It is like the story in old westerns of a big bad landowner who takes what he wants when he wants it, ruthlessly terrorizing a town without a strong sheriff. Any individual who tries to stop the landowner is beaten into submission or killed. The situation continues until the town finds a strong enough sheriff to regain control over the landowner and his gang. This is the Old West version of the feudal system. In westerns, the feudal lord comes first and the sheriff comes later. But in the United States of thirty years ago, the government was the strong sheriff keeping the late-twentieth-century feudal lords from taking what they wanted. As long as the government was supported by its citizens—particularly its middle class—no one could ride into town and steal what belonged to the people. But if the government were weakened or destroyed, a different situation would arise. The intent of the plan for Corporate Feudalism was to convince the middle class to fire their sheriff. And that’s just what happened.
Thirty years ago at the onset of the Reagan Revolution, the middle class basically appreciated and respected their government and believed that living in the United States was good for the middle class. They took their status for granted. The connection between what was good about the United States and its government was clear to the American public. For the most part, people believed the government was on their side and largely responsible for the high standard of living they enjoyed. Their government built the roads that made transportation easy. Their government made the laws and regulations that kept US workers safe at their jobs. Their government ensured that their food was safe. The labor strife that had empowered the middle class was now decades old, and the Vietnam War had ended, although not well. In many ways the United States of thirty years ago was a happy place, and most people understood their government’s role in keeping it that way. While there were problems, including the energy crisis, they seemed manageable. Not everyone was happy with everything the government did, of course, but there was general agreement that the US government was the best government anywhere.
Then the US government found itself in the crosshairs of the brand-new Reagan Revolution with no way to understand why it was under attack and no way to defend itself. For thirty years, it took blow after blow. Now, while still standing, that government is very different from what it was when Reagan took office. It is much weaker, no longer able to offer the protections or provide the services the middle class took for granted thirty years ago—the same kinds of services that many European democracies have continued to provide for their citizens during the period of US economic and social decline. And in its weakened state the US government has lost the support of the very citizens who depended on it the most, the middle class.
How did this happen? When Ronald Reagan got to Washington, he set out to convince the middle class that their government was their enemy, using his considerable powers of persuasion. The basic message of Reagan and the conservatives was that everyone would be better off if the federal government just disappeared. They were smart enough not to say this directly, however. Instead, they just landed one body blow after another without openly expressing their desire to destroy the government.
For example, Reagan attacked government workers, contending they were lazy, they wasted taxpayer money, and they involved themselves in issues they knew nothing about, like regulating large businesses and corporations. Within the first few years of Reagan’s election, the morale of the federal workforce plummeted as these employees saw their image shift from being considered public servants trying to make life in the United States better for everyone to being seen as lazy, despised bureaucrats wasting taxpayer money. Far from being a place where committed public servants worked to help the public, Washington, DC, became known as the place where crooks, thieves, and lazy workers stole taxpayer money for foolish purposes or their own personal benefit.
While federal workers had unions to protect their jobs, they did not have high-priced lobbyists and media consultants to safeguard their image. The unions representing federal workers came under the same harsh attack as the workers themselves, but the attacks went largely unanswered. The nation’s first movie star president had intentionally created this negative image of government workers, and he was convincing.
Following Reagan, other conservatives continued to lead the charge against the government, often using the same language the Reagan administration had employed. Few found language more effective than the Reagan one-liner, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” but they didn’t need to. The leap from John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” to Reagan’s cynical and supposedly frightening “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” had been successfully made.
In addition to waging a full-scale campaign against the government and its employees, the Reagan administration also implemented another practice that was equally destructive to the image of government—filling government positions with people who hated government, a practice that continues to this day. For those seeking to change the United States from a middle-class democracy to a corporate feudal republic, there are three major advantages to this practice. First, you give government jobs to your conservative friends and cronies. Second, you keep dedicated public servants who want to see government succeed out of government. Third, and most importantly, you have a cadre of conservative ideologues working inside the government to sabotage and destroy the government at every turn.
The advantages for conservatives of sabotaging and destroying the government are almost limitless. Looking at a few examples from George W. Bush’s administration shows why. Thirty years ago the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a government agency committed to protecting the public by monitoring the safety of toys and other products, made a positive difference in people’s lives. However, during George W. Bush’s administration conservatives who filled many of the civil service positions and all of the politically appointed slots did not believe the government should be in the business of helping to protect the public, and they did everything in their power to avoid carrying out their responsibilities. When Congress tried to give the CPSC more money to do a better job of regulating products imported from China, for example, the Bush-appointed agency head refused. She said they had plenty of money to do their job, although in reality they weren’t doing their job at all. Then reports started coming in about unsafe toys originating in China. People were outraged, as they should have been, and blamed the government. By failing to do their jobs, the conservatives were encouraging people to give up on their own government, which was exactly what conservatives wanted.
Thirty years ago, in an effort to make their point, conservatives often exaggerated the examples of government corruption and waste, but during George W. Bush’s administration scandals involving everything from toys to military contracting became the norm. And who were the perpetrators of most of these crimes against the United States and its taxpayers? They were government-hating conservatives working inside the government, placed there for this very reason. Each time one of these conservatives was caught in another scandal, the American public’s view of government deteriorated a little more. If you believe in a government that helps its citizens, this seems bad. But if you believe that the best government is no government this seems great, so the people who wanted to establish Corporate Feudalism couldn’t have been happier.
That was the plan used by Corporate Feudalists to convince millions of middle-class people to hate their own government. Did you think of a more effective way to accomplish this goal? Or do you believe the plan that was used was the most effective one available?
The police came at four in the morning with a battering ram to the Cruz home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And that was only one of the five eviction attempts required to finally claim the home for the banks.
“After we had been peacefully occupying this house for over a month without any incidents, then they come in with a battering ram and blame us for disturbing the peace,” said Nick Espinosa, one of the organizers with Occupy Homes Minnesota, which has taken the lead in saving local families from being put out on the street.
The battering ram was just adding insult to injury—the Cruz family was being evicted through no fault of their own, because PNC bank had made a mistake in processing their payments. The Occupy Homes crew moved into the house to try and defend it while the sheriff's department came once and then twice to evict.
“We had people who were locking down to concrete barrels and other devices to prevent them from evicting the house and we were mobilizing people to come and defend the house,” Espinosa said. Over the course of the five eviction attempts there were 26 arrests. The last time Espinosa was arrested along with 14 others and charged with rioting in the third degree, defined as “Violence or the threat of violence to people or property when more than three are gathered.”
They face up to two years in prison. Espinosa noted, “There are 15 people now facing riot charges who were arrested doing nonviolent civil disobedience, basically sitting down and linking arms on the front steps of a house.”
“The chief of police was there the night I was arrested. Four other officers stepped over us as we were sitting in front of the door,” he continued. “He stepped directly on top of us, on our shoulders and necks, to come into the house.” The previous day police had grabbed protesters by the neck to move them out of the way, and women activists complained of feeling sexually assaulted, having been groped by the police. “Somebody's hand went up one of my friends' shirts,” Espinosa said. One of the Cruzes' neighbors was arrested while standing on the sidewalk outside her house holding up a sign in support of Occupy Homes.
The battle to save the Cruz home is just one of many being fought by organizers around the country to stop the epidemic of foreclosures, many rooted in fraud or bank error – foreclosures that continue to shake the economy four years after the housing bubble burst. No high-level bankers, of course, have been charged with any crime for the systemic fraud and misconduct that led to the economy's near collapse; but peaceful community activists standing up for their neighbors face serious jail time.
“The city has the option to use their discretion about how they react to situations like this,” Espinosa said. “There are plenty of other crimes that they could be pursuing. They don't have to come and respond to that issue of people being in this house, that's technically trespassing.” Evicted by Bank Error
“We had made the sheriffs very aware of the situation and said don't get involved in this, just let it be, we're working out a solution,” Espinosa explained.
PNC Bank, the mortgage lender, failed to process an online payment made by the Cruz family—and then demanded two months' worth to make up for it. The family couldn't come up with the money, and the bank moved to foreclose.
“We began working with a local nonprofit that was supposed to be working out a loan modification,” Alejandra Cruz explained in a blog post that accompanied a Change.org petition to save her family's home. The bank told the family they would work on a solution, but the family was served with an eviction notice anyway.
Alejandra and David Cruz are college students and DREAM act organizers; their family is from Mexico City. “Until now,” Alejandra pointed out, “many families in the Latino community have been afraid to stand up when they are being mistreated by the banks that fraudulently foreclose on families across the country. The banks have used this fear and manipulation of a complicated legal system to profit from honest, hardworking people.”
“I believe what they were doing is saying they were negotiating and then with the other hand pushing forward with the eviction so they didn't have any responsibility to work with the family,” Espinosa said.
This process is so common that it has a name: dual tracking. It's also been called out by lawmakers and attorneys general as unfair and deceptive to homeowners. "We don't think that a homeowner who is making a good-faith effort to work through their troubled mortgage should have the roof ripped out from over them while they are negotiating, or trying to negotiate," Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, told the Los Angeles Times last year.
Yet the process continues, and families across the country struggle with it every day, often without the support of neighbors and organizers willing to put their bodies on the line and risk arrest to keep them in their homes.
Alejandra and David took a road trip across the country in June to PNC's headquarters, but the bank's executives refused to bend. (Last year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found PNC, one of the nation's largest banks, to have “unsafe and unsound” mortgage servicing and foreclosure practices, including robo-signing.)
For now, the Cruzes are living in an apartment and continue to pressure the bank to work out a solution to get them back in their home (which was bought by Freddie Mac at a sheriff's sale, and remains boarded up). They continue, as well, to organize with Occupy Homes in support of other families.
The system is stacked against families like these, though—banks have expensive lawyers and go through this regularly, while families struggling to pay the bills have little help. “The legal system is not the battleground for us to win against the banks,” Espinosa said. “The way we're going to do that is through popular pressure and people power.” Keeping Up the Fight
Espinosa considers the arrests and riot charges an escalation by the city to try and stifle their organizing and direct action. “For them it's a political issue that exposes the fact that they're complicit in all these foreclosures and that if they weren't sending the police with our city resources to come and evict families who are being thrown out through no fault of their own, the banking system would not continue to profit off of tearing communities apart.”
“The city is trying to make an example out of people, especially core organizers, by using trumped-up charges to try to force us to take a worse plea deal,” he continued.
He and others have been offered plea deals, but they refuse to take the deals unless the riot charges are dropped against all of them. “We're using court solidarity to demand that everybody gets a fair deal,” he explained. “We're ultimately asking them to drop all the charges because we think it's ridiculous that they're going after peaceful protesters protecting their neighbors instead of the banks who crashed our economy through massive fraud.”
Minneapolis's mayor, R.T. Rybak, had released a statement before the arrests saying “The City is not in the foreclosure business,” and “The City plays a limited role to protect public safety.” Yet, Espinosa noted, the normally-progressive mayor's words didn't match his actions. “If you cared about people and cared about doing something about the foreclosure crisis, your priorities would not be trying to intimidate people with bogus riot charges.”
“He has the power to direct the police not to enforce the evictions, he has the power to publicly state that banks should be negotiating with people and we couldn't get him to do that,” Espinosa continued. “I'd much rather be going after the bank than going after the mayor, but when he puts himself between our ability to do the work and acts as a protector of the bank then he puts himself in the crossfire and becomes a political target.”
Occupy movements around the country have dealt with this problem: some argue that the movement should focus solely on the banks, while others note that it's impossible to do so when the political and legal systems enforce the banks' will and offer little recourse to everyday people.
However, Espinosa noted, there's an upside to the ridiculous charges and police brutality (not to mention wasted resources in keeping the home under guard and prosecuting peaceful protesters). Local support for their movement has grown, from neighbors up and down the Cruzes' block to local celebrity Brother Ali, a hip-hop artist who had been a supporter of Occupy Homes for a while but took his first arrest as part of the civil disobedience at the Cruz home. Because of canvassing the block for support, Espinosa said, Occupy Homes also found another homeowner fighting foreclosure and helped him get a mortgage modification. “A lot of new people have been galvanized by the outrageous nature of these charges,” he noted.
Occupy Homes Minnesota continues to fight for local families, having just celebrated Monique White's victory and the victory of Espinosa's own mother in keeping their homes. Despite the distraction that the ongoing struggle over criminal charges poses, they remain determined to win both the right for the Cruzes to return to their home and their legal battles.
“If they want to take people to trial and try to convince a jury that we were rioting by sitting down and linking arms,” Espinosa said, “we can do that.”
When you think about the terrible effects of climate change, I bet you picture droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, which makes sense — climate change is causing weather patterns to go absolutely crazy. But the crazy weather leads to other consequences that we often don’t think about when we hear the globe is warming up. Here is a list of 5 frightening effects from climate change this summer. 1. Increased Suicide
Besides destroying crops and causing food prices to spike, droughts have recently been linked to an alarming consequence: suicide. In a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found a link between droughts and suicides among men ages 30 to 49 living in rural areas in Australia. After evaluating 40 years of drought and suicide data for the state of New South Wales, droughts were linked to a 15 percent increase in suicide risk among these men. This link was also found in men under 30, though no link was found among women.
Though research for this study was completed in Australia, links between droughts and suicides have been made before, particularly in India where thousands of farmers kill themselves each year. In fact, a recent article states that one farmer in India commits suicide every 12 hours.
As the United States is seeing its largest drought since 1956, there are reasons to be concerned about the correlation. While the authors of the study note, “suicide is a complex phenomenon with many interacting social, environmental, and biological causal factors,” there are plenty of explanations for the correlation. The authors write that farmers and farming communities lose a lot of money when droughts destroy their crops. They also state that farmers experience mental distress when witnessing the devastation of their livestock and crops.
The authors remind us that if we don’t truly work to stop climate change, we will have to face the disturbing effects. They conclude in their abstract: “Elucidating the relationships between drought and mental health will help facilitate adaptation to climate change.” 2. West Nile Virus
What do you get when you combine increasingly warm weather and thousands of mosquitoes? A huge outbreak of West Nile virus. As droughts are causing creek waters to stop flowing, mosquitoes are finding the perfect breeding spot in the standing water. Mosquitoes also mature and thus breed faster in the heat. Meanwhile, warm weather also decreases the virus’ incubation period. This all allows the virus to spread rapidly. In addition, earlier springs and milder winters lengthen breeding season.
According to the Center for Disease Control, West Nile virus has infected 1,118 people and killed 41 people across the nation. Human cases have been detected in 38 states, while human and animal cases have been detected in 47 states. Texas, especially Dallas County, has been hard hit, with 586 reported cases and 11 deaths. 3. River Obstruction
What’s the number-one thing you need to distribute goods along the Mississippi River? Water. But the drought has shortchanged the river this summer, as its water levels hit a record low. For instance, the water level near Memphis is 12 feel lower than normal. As a result, 11 miles of the river was recently closed when a vessel ran aground. The river’s shutdown halted nearly 100 boats and barges from passing. Obstruction of riverways can have devastating effects on the economy. In 2010, more than $40 billion worth of cargo passes along the Mississippi River.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has responded with lots of dredging, a process of clearing out an area of water by scooping up sediment. However, as we often realize, trying to put a bandage on our environmental crisis rarely works. Dredging causes its own environmental impact, including harming marine ecosystems and spreading toxins near the site.
USACE is dredging in an attempt to make the river deep enough so heavy barges can pass. Shippers have had to lighten their barges, which is increasing their fuel and labor costs, and is, of course, not very sustainable.
The river has since opened, but several ports along the river have closed, and low water levels are expected to affect cargo until October.
The captain of one dredge, Frank Segree, said, "If we lose the river system it's just like losing the interstate highway system …Commerce is a vital part of our nation. This is a main artery for commerce." 4. Nuclear Plant Shutdown
Nuclear power plants often rely on cold waters to cool their reactors. But as hot weather is causing water temperatures to rise, nuclear plants have had to respond. In Connecticut, the Millstone nuclear plant was recently shut down as the waters surrounding it reached nearly 77 degrees, 2 degrees higher than the 75 degrees the reactor was designed to withstand.
In July, an Illinois nuclear plant, whose reactor was built to work in water below 98 degrees, asked for special permission to continue operation when the waters around it reached 102 degrees. Permission was granted partly because if a nuclear plant shuts down, cold water must be available to cool all equipment.
Craig Nesbit, the owner of the plant, told the New York Times, "Last thing in the world you’d ever want to do, if there was no safety implication, is shut down a 2,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the biggest heat wave in the last 30 years."
Other plants in the Midwest have faced similar problems with warm water temperatures as well as low water levels, which inhibit reactors’ pipes from drawing up water.
Although we should be focusing on creating more sustainable initiatives than nuclear energy, even greener energy projects are struggling to meet the supply of our large energy demand. For example, California’s hydroelectric power plants cannot produce as much electricity this summer due to the drought. Perhaps, the only truly sustainable approach we can take is to change our resource-consuming lifestyles.
Still, the worst-case scenario is not simply a reduction of energy, but a nuclear plant meltdown. Emergency officials in Connecticut even held a drill to deal with two fictitious accidents at the Millstone nuclear plant. They prepared for a release of large amounts of radioactivity from the reactor. The governor declared a general emergency, closing parks, moving schoolchildren to evacuation centers, evacuating residents within five miles of the plant and distributing potassium iodide pills to guard against absorption of radioactive iodine through people’s thyroids. 5. Cows Fed Candy
With corn nearly $9 a bushel due to the drought, Nick Smith, the co-owner of United Livestock Commodities in Kentucky, said his farm had to come up with a cheaper way to feed his cattle. The remedy? A concoction of candy rejected for human consumption, an ethanol byproduct and a mineral nutrient.
Joseph Watson, also a co-owner of the farm, said, "Just to be able to survive, we have to look for other sources of nutrition."
Watson claims the cows seem to be doing okay. But since cows are designed to eat grass — not corn, and certainly not an expired candy and ethanol mixture — the sweet mixture probably won’t be promising. And there are human side-effects, too: cows that don’t eat grass are more prone to developing E. coli, which can infect various types of food we eat.
Just this past week, a produce supplier in California recalled its romaine lettuce in fear of possible E.coli contamination. So vegetarians, don’t think we’re in the clear. Nobody is safe from these terrible climate change consequences that are affecting people -- and animals -- worldwide.
Thu, 08/23/2012 - 14:32
" The Roving Giraffe News Report " provided through #AceNewsServices
Remember Carole Morison from the documentary “Food, Inc.“? She was the chicken farmer under contract with Perdue, the country’s third largest chicken processor, who offered a rare look at what an industrial chicken farm looks like. The chickens barely had room to move, and many died daily due to the conditions and their accelerated breeding. She was tired of it — by agreeing to take part in the film, Morison put her livelihood in jeopardy. Perdue terminated her contract in 2008 after she refused to entirely enclose her chicken houses.
Her eyes were opened to the truth and she now uses sustainable farming methods and has never been so happy and content!
